Because it touches on all aspects of business, there is no question of business ethics being 'specialist' insofar as this is something to be contrasted with 'generalist'. It is not, however, that particular contrast that is at issue here. The sense in which the teacher of business ethics is a specialist is in combining a generalist understanding of all aspects of business (and perhaps one or more in particular) with a scholarly and, where necessary (see issue 4), deeply theoretical understanding of ethical reasoning and ethical phenomena. The contrast, therefore, is with a non-specialist in the sense of someone who (as is alleged to happen to the integrated approach discussed above) focuses on some particular area of business and looks at ethical problems within it in an unscholarly and untheoretical way.

At its worst, this latter kind of non-specialist teaching relies on what are seen as common sense conventions for solutions to ethical problems or, what might be even worse, leaves them open as merely as matters of opinion to which no considered judgment can be brought. What is certain, is that it can have neither the breadth nor depth of what, in contrast, is describable as 'specialist' teaching. So to that extent, the case for the specialist is perhaps overwhelming.

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